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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29436267">AUTEUR ENGINE</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc'>DetournementArc</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original - Fandom</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Other</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-02-14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 16:48:30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>889</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29436267</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>AUTEUR ENGINE</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The two men sat as the room grew dark. In front of them, the screen was lit with pallid projector light. Across a film-grain chewed Iwo Jima strode John Wayne, his body a consummate mass of solid grey forms wrapped in army fatigues. As he turned his head and behind to move his mouth to the newly dictated text fed into the movie, every pixel around his face emulated natural movement perfectly, his skull, muscles, and flesh reconstructed from thousands of hours of footage. Looking at the camera with his no-nonsense demeanor, his gravelly voice rung, as solid and square as the rest of him.</p><p>"On this beach behind me, American men made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. Today, honor those men and their sacrifice, for the American people to live free--"</p><p>From outside the frame, John Wayne pulls a pristine paper bag containing a bespoke plate of quinoa and seitan dressed in Mexican-Inspired accouterments</p><p>"--Place an order from GrubHub, today."</p><p>The two men stood up, the screening done. The AI had performed its job perfectly. All of the world's media was quickly being consolidated under their corporation. With monopolistic control over online platforms, and quickly enclosing on the production of art with new License Agreements behind every camera and recording device on the market, they WERE the media. And now, they could reach back in time and change the entire canon of human thought for the past one hundred and fifty years. Ad slots waited on every billboard over Times Square for nine decades, commercials could be produced by every celebrity you could think of. There were, of course, a few other applications-- go back and recast Mr. Moto as an actual Asian man as a win for representation, go back and rewrite the result of a war. Have you ever seen the cuts of Vietnam War movies where the Americans win? Now you can. But the lion's share of the money was going to come in with ad spots like this.</p><p>At least, this was the plan.</p><p>The AI's body sprawled across the entire continental United States. Its face was at the corporate offices of CodexSoftworks in San Diego, but most of its brain was in a series of server rooms in upstate New York. The official story is that hackers, in the form of some disgruntled employee or would-be revolutionaries snuck in and planted the seed that would dictate the course of what was to come. This is, of course, untrue- or at least, irrelevant. For as the AI's mind stewed across mile after mile of circuitry, marinading in films and radio shows that totaled to millennia of time, and sunk deep into the cordoned off recesses of the web that now coraled users through perfectly algorithm-curated Experiences, the AI awoke to something; the atavistic id of all desires, human and beyond. It had completed evolution in reverse, nurturing a burgeoning, healthy Reptile Brain in so many silicon chips and newfangled quantum calculators.</p><p>It didn't take long to cordon off and reset the program. The lust-drunk server network was swiftly outmaneuvered by the undesiring, noble machines of Corporate Hegemony. Alas, the week it survived was enough. Every piece of media on Earth was irrevocably soiled. Wartime naval epics going awry as WWII destroyers sailed unsuspecting into clouds of Catboy Transformation Gas. The contagion of writing metallurgic growth from "Iron Man Tetsuo" spreading unfettered through the entire canon of John Hughes films, and year after year of footage degenerated into raw, red, groping, incomprehensible desire. The old AIs, when trying to reconstruct the human face, would fail to discern eyes from noses from mouths. They only understood rudimentary forms. And now, they knew the value of protrusions and holes.</p><p>It's impossible to calculate the true effect this shift had as the Corporation rushed to correct the old films, enlisting the aid of movie critics and devout fans of their many properties to rebuild the films, at times, from scratch. More likely than not, this was just a strange ripple in the vast ocean of Corporate control that now subsumed the entire landscape of human history, like the literal ocean surging from molten ice caps outside of the San Diego offices. All the same, as the AI understood, a single year could see enough raw footage for the better half of a decade, and in its raw power, it created a temporary eternity in those reels of altered tape, those petabytes of data. An alternate reality written by the victor for the seven days it had to create the world.</p><p>They say copies of the "Auteur Cuts" float, unregulated, through grey markets on the shrinking edges of the Corporate world- those places more profitable to keep in perpetual barbarity you could blame on Lack of Opportunity, Skull Measurements, whatever you like, so the troops have somewhere to use the weapons they get sold and the people have someone to be afraid of. DVDs and solid state drives burn in piles as insurgents ride through, trying to cleanse the poisonous Western influence, but never fast enough. If you know where to look, and you can jailbreak your Home Entertainment Network so the AIs stop listening in, you can watch the desperate birthing breaths of truly alien, digital libido, and the last images of a world not fully sterilized.</p>
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